circle or longer way, according to the constituted and fore-laid
principles of his art: yet this rule of His He doth sometimes pervert, to
acquaint the world with His prerogative, lest the arrogancy of our reason
should question His power, and conclude He could not. And thus I call
the effects of nature the works of God, whose hand and instrument she
only is; and therefore to ascribe His actions unto her, is to devolve the
honour of the principal agent upon the instrument; which, if with reason
we may do, then let our hammers rise up and boast they have built our
houses, and our pens receive the honour of our writing. . . . Now nature
is not at variance with art, nor art with nature: they being both
servants of His providence. Art is the perfection of nature: were the
world now as it was the sixth day, there were yet a chaos. Nature hath
made one world, and art another. In brief, all things are artificial;
for nature is the art of God.



ON PHILOSOPHY


Beware of philosophy, is a precept not to be received in too large a
sense; for in this mass of nature there is a set of things that carry in
their front, though not in capital letters, yet in stenography, and short
characters, something of divinity, which to wiser reasons serve as
luminaries in the abyss of knowledge, and to judicious beliefs, as scales
and rundles to mount the pinnacles and highest pieces of divinity. The
severe schools shall never laugh me out of the philosophy of Hermes, that
this visible world is but a picture of the invisible, wherein, as in a
portrait, things are not truly, but in equivocal shapes, and as they
counterfeit some real substance in that invisible fabric.